The dream wafts awayastray like an untamed wordas smoke rises from the ashtray.

What once was this weary minutewill fall in with its concentric herd, pulling centrifugallyto the center of the clock.

It's shock of burred staticbut there will be no dirge-the angle emerges, the sextant points onif you can believe it

(how can I believe

aword? it's all illusionexcept the vanishing act).

The stench of the bilge and the sea's slow pressand this smoked shadow are what I possess.

Carrera 17A

It is night on my island, and in the calmafter the shouts and songs of what's for salethe yellow rectangles in the tall apartment buildingsdisappear one by one.The people walking the bay in twos and threes and fours,pushing their strollers, talking into the air, walking their dogs, kissing their lovers,are slowly going home, to leave the bat to count its pace in a slow sleeping breathlike a mother who sleeps lightly, waiting for her children to come home.The children leave the island for the city center, on buses and in taxis,for the hip-bumping rum-downing scenes of downtown.I could be out there, too. After all, as my mother says,La juventud es pa' divertirse. Vete bailaindo y tomando, nena. But I don't go;I am trying to write my poem.In my house,the lightbulbs sing a buzzing waitfor the sons who will be out until five in the morning.

Recording of Elizabeth Bishop reading “Filling Station”

A sea of seated pilgrims,clad in somber overcoatsand hats, long only forsome consequence.

Between, even within, linesthe lector sojourns in a hullof her own locution, dutifully endures- and more than once -that someone’s antiphonal coughlike the slap of an errant breaker;in its wake, the hush prickleswith static until she resumes.

A surging laugh after“Someone waters the plant, or oils it maybe” –and the swell smoothes her voiceover a chuckle to tie off the rhythmgently,underhanded, “so,so,so,” guiding each stitch’s saround the nextuntil it is sound.

Marina Read Weiss has work forthcoming in Boston Review, Circus, and Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and has received the Academy of American Poets' University Prize and a Fulbright grant. She read poetry for Dominic Luxford at The Believer, and she had the good fortune of working with Terrance Hayes, Daniel Hall, and the late Craig Arnold.